Six weeks into Israel's Gaza blockade, last food is running out
STORY: It's been six weeks since Israel blockaded Gaza and this is all Rehab Akhras has left for her family of 13 to eat.
She and many others live in this camp of plastic sheets in Khan Younis.
The bombs haven't killed them but hunger will, she says, if Israel doesn't open the checkpoints it has sealed off since the start of March.
"We have survived the war and we survived the airstrikes as we wake up and go to sleep. But we can't survive the hunger, neither us nor our children. Open the crossings and let the children eat and we eat, the sick people and the patients need food.'
In Nuseirat, an outdoor emergency kitchen is on its last legs.
Emergency meal distributions like this are ending.
Israel has cut off all supplies to Gaza's 2.3 million residents. Food stockpiled during a ceasefire at the start of the year has all but run out.
Aid agencies who supply the emergency meals ksay they will have to stop within days unless they can bring in more food.
Neama Farjalla says she treks through the war zone every day, leaving at 6 a.m. in the hope of a plate of rice for her children.
The World Food Programme used to provide bread to 25 bakeries across the Gaza Strip. All are now shut and it says it will soon have to halt food parcel distribution.
Juliette Touma of the U.N.'s UNRWA agency:
"All basic supplies are running out. The markets are also running out of basics. There was a black market in Gaza. Now it's a very, very black market. And what I mean by that is that the prices of commodities have exponentially increased over the past one month plus... WHITE FLASH Babies, children are going to bed hungry. Every day without these basic supplies, Gaza inches closer towards very, very deep hunger.'
Every Gazan can now quote the fantastical prices for the little food left: a 55 pound sack of flour that used to sell for $6 now costs ten times as much.
A quarter gallon of cooking oil, if you can find it, costs $10 instead of $1.50.
Medical charity Medicins sans Frontiers says it is encountering children and pregnant women with severe malnutrition. Lactating mothers are too hungry to be able to breast feed.
Israel denies that Gaza is facing a hunger crisis. The military accuses Hamas militants of exploiting aid, and says it must keep supplies out to prevent the fighters from getting it.
Hamas denies this.
Back in Khan Younis, Akhras says she believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu means to kill them.
"We are being humiliated. He wants to kill us slowly and we will die slowly.'
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Video does not show China recently airdropping aid to Gaza
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Yahoo
21 hours ago
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‘These are traps set for the people': the story of a mother shot dead searching for food in Gaza
default Reem Zeidan was terrified of being separated from her children. As they trudged for hours through the ruins of Gaza towards a food distribution centre, she rehearsed over and over again with her 20-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son what they should do and where they should wait if an Israeli attack turned the column of hungry people into a chaotic, panicking mass and the family were torn apart. It was the last conversation she had with them. She was dead before dawn broke on Tuesday, killed by a single bullet through her forehead. Her daughter and son spent nearly three hours beside her body, pinned down by gunfire. 'We went there out of desperation. Hunger is what forced my mother to go. She had been going every day for a full week walking six hours to get there and coming back with nothing,' Mirvat, her daughter, said in a phone interview. 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'Her last words were: 'If we get separated, where will we meet again?'' Mirvat said. 'But now we've been separated forever.' Both saw their mother being killed. Ahmad turned round after a girl behind him started screaming and watched his mother collapse, face down, behind him. 'I started trying to wake her up, shaking her and shouting her name,' Ahmad said. 'The sound of explosions grew louder, snipers were firing in all directions, and quadcopters [drones] around us were also shooting. In just one second, everything turned upside down without us knowing why.' *** Reem's death was a tragedy foretold; her children's loss a grief that could have been prevented. Humanitarians had warned that mixing guns and food would put civilians at risk since Israel and the US first mooted plans to concentrate food delivery in hubs guarded by private security contractors and the Israeli military. 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Reem was kind and cheerful, Mirvat said, quick to laugh and with a ready smile. She treated her children with respect and kept order in their large family through love, not fear. When a child got upset at being chastised, she would comfort them with their favourite food. 'She'd come with a smile on her face and start explaining that she did what she did for his own good. She would keep trying until he was happy again,' her daughter said. 'She loved to listen to our thoughts and valued our opinions.' Mirvat was in her last year of high school when the war began. Her dreams of going to university to study law have been set aside, replaced by the basic hope that the rest of her family will survive the war, and by new responsibility now her mother is gone. 'My future is clear. There are children depending on me, so even if education starts up again I won't be able to go back,' she said. 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